Excel VBA: output the result of a WinHTTPRequest in Excel? - vba

Question

How do I output the result of a WinHTTPRequest in Excel?
For example, the following code queries the stock quote of Apple from a webpage but it doesn't output anything:
Sub GetQuotes()
Dim XMLHTTP As Object, html As Object, pontod As Object
On Error Resume Next
Set oHtml = New HTMLDocument
With CreateObject("WINHTTP.WinHTTPRequest.5.1")
.Open "GET", "http://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=AAPL.O", False
.send
oHtml.body.innerHTML = .responseText
End With
'Price
Set pontod = oHtml.getElementsByClassName("sectionQuote nasdaqChange")(0).getElementsByTagName("span")(1)
MsgBox pontod.innerText
End Sub
While this runs perfectly for the name:
Sub GetQuotes2()
Dim XMLHTTP As Object, html As Object, pontod As Object
On Error Resume Next
Set oHtml = New HTMLDocument
With CreateObject("WINHTTP.WinHTTPRequest.5.1")
.Open "GET", "http://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=AAPL.O", False
.send
oHtml.body.innerHTML = .responseText
End With
'Name
Set pontod = oHtml.getElementById("sectionTitle").getElementsByTagName("h1")(0)
MsgBox pontod.innerText
End Sub
I'd like to be able to fetch the whole page and look for specific HTML elements in it, but how do I manage to see the whole response from the query?

Answer 1

As Jeeped said above, the method getElementsByClassName doesn't work on an XML request.
However, by looking at the webpage you're trying to scrape, you can work-around the issue by using this line:
Set pontod = oHtml.getElementById("headerQuoteContainer").getElementsByTagName("span")(1)
instead of this one:
Set pontod = oHtml.getElementsByClassName("sectionQuote nasdaqChange")(0).getElementsByTagName("span")(1)
As you can observe from the HTML structure of the webpage:
... your price is not only the second span element of the first div with class names sectionQuote and nasdaqChange, but also the second span element of the unique object with id headerQuoteContainer.
Hence, scrape it from there will avoid you to use the invalid method getElementsByClassName (which is a valid HTML method, but not when the HTML is an XML response) for the classic getElementById().